An ideal LIMS is scientist-centric and user friendly. LIMS software should be modern just like software that's used in other industries, i.e. Notion, Trello, Slack, etc.

The one that everyone's been talking about these days is Genemod. All my colleagues at GWU use it. Now I'm at Sana and I know several R&D teams using them for both ELN and freezer management.

www.genemod.com

There are tons of “What to Look for in a LIMS” lists floating around online - but honestly, most of them aren’t all that helpful. They’re often written by people who’ve never actually used a LIMS themselves, or by savvy marketing teams who know how to write for SEO (so their product ranks well on google).

I used to work at a mid-sized biotech company where we implemented one of the industry’s so-called "leading" LIMS - and it was genuinely one of the worst pieces of software I’ve ever encountered. It was incredibly expensive, clunky, and anything but user-friendly. Just keeping it running required constant support (and more money). At one point, our team had to go back to paper and spreadsheets because the system was slowing us down - and we had deadlines to meet.

When evaluating a LIMS or ELN, my advice is: focus on the basics. It's easy to get distracted by flashy features like AI integrations, but most systems still struggle to get the fundamentals right - especially in a way that's intuitive for scientists.

Here are a few things that really matter (and surprisingly often fall short):

– Adding samples (individually, in small batches, or bulk uploads)

– Setting up and customizing storage locations without needing a system admin

- Easy tracking of relationships between samples

– Logging samples out, and being able to undo mistakes (with proper audit trails), without needing coding knowledge.

These might sound obvious, but you'd be surprised how many systems - especially the older, more “established” ones - still make these simple tasks unnecessarily difficult.